Charles H. Stebbins Jr. wanted to be paid the same as a white teacher. In his quest, he became the Rosa Parks of Palm Beach County’s public teachers.
Stebbins never benefited from the battle for which he agreed to be the poster boy; the day it ended in victory, he was waiting tables in New York. But a federal judge’s decision that the county’s black teachers must be paid the same as whites set a stunning precedent in 1941. And it was a step toward the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision that outlawed school segregation.
Palm Beach County’s white teachers with five years of experience had received a $25 raise in 1941 to $140 a month. Furious black teachers, who got no raise, founded the Palm Beach County Teachers Association, and about 85 percent of the county’s 115 black teachers joined.
The next step was a federal lawsuit. The group brought in NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, later the U.S. Supreme Court’s first black justice. The group needed a name to put atop the suit: Stebbins.
“He was not afraid. He had the guts,” recalls Delray Beach educator C. Spencer Pompey Jr.
Stebbins taught social studies at West Palm Beach’s black Industrial High School – until his moment with history. Stebbins was fired. A school board official offered him $500 and his job back if he’d drop the case. His wife was ill with tuberculosis – she would die a year and a half later – but he declined. The black union reneged on a promise to pay him a year’s salary if he lost his job.
“He was blackballed throughout the state,” said Stebbins Jefferson, his niece and a Palm Beach Post columnist. “He was the troublemaker.”
He never returned to education, and he died in 1991.
– ELIOT KLEINBERG

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